Publisher:“Stay Calm And Dream On”

By Brenda H. Andrews
Publisher
New Journal and Guide

Delivered January 19, 2025 upon receiving the 2025 King Dreamer Award from the City of Norfolk and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra.

NORFOLK

Thank you to the City of Norfolk and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra for bringing us together tonight to pay tribute to the legacy of a truly great man, whose vision, powerful words and courageous actions remain a force for good in our nation and our world.

I feel honored to receive and accept the 2025 VSO MLK Dreamer Award and I sincerely thank you. I also thank those of you present who have congratulated me and delivered warm wishes.

I  am blessed to have lived as a youth during the civil rights movement led by Dr. King, and others, participating fully through marches, boycotts, protest demonstrations, and being one of the City of Lynchburg’s four children to desegregate the public schools under federal court order. I gained lasting convictions that inspired me to view my life as an opportunity to be a force for good. As the owner of the New Journal and Guide, I have given priority to  ensuring the 125-year legacy of this newspaper remains a force for good as it reports the often untold and missing stories of Black history week by week as they have  occurred.

I grew up in an era where President John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”

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Where Malcolm X said, “You are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem.”

Where Dr. Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream …”

All three men called for a reordering of the circumstances of their day for the common good of all. All three were messengers who died young by assassins’ bullets.  But their messages lived on.

What is this ambiguity we have with Dr. King’s dream? Why do we love to talk about the dream 62 years after King’s 1963 speech in Washington, D.C.? And yet why do so many of us do no more than talk? Why are some still trying to kill the dream as they did the dreamer? Why are some now calling the dream a nightmare from which we should awaken?

Still it is we who revere Dr. King who know the dream was never given as wishful thinking. Instead  Dr. King’s was a transformative voice in the wilderness calling forth a oneness of the human family in the land of the free to be a force for good.

His was a vision, a view of promising possibilities beyond the dark and dismal world for marginalized populations in 1963.

The dream then and now inspires hope unseen for a more just world and a bright future for all not just a privileged few. As early as three centuries BC, Aristotle,  called the world’s greatest philosopher, said, “ Hope is a waking dream.”

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One more dreamer from Dr. King’s era whose voice also was silenced by a violent act and yet his message lives on, was U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. He said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

I remember Dr. King’s dream with expectant celebration tonight because it resonates with the moral part of who we were created to be. King’s dream is a force for good and a reminder of our need to join this force.

In our current era of fear-driven, hate-based and self-serving immoral and bellowing winds, let us who still believe in Dr. King and his legacy remember to Stay Calm and Dream On.  For “ … the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Thank you.